


Behind the Curtain

by greenglowsgold



Category: The Flash (TV 2014), Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Flashvibe as paladins, Fluffy Adventure Time!, M/M, brief references to other characters being in the verse too, in which the unvierse is Weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 11:16:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9546458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenglowsgold/pseuds/greenglowsgold
Summary: For a planet blindly sending out a distress beacon across the universe, this one looked remarkably healthy. Not that they were experts in alien ecosystems, of course. Who knew what 'healthy' was supposed to look like here?“Shit.” Cisco's eyebrows rose, following the flowers all the way out to the horizon. “It’s like the Emerald City. Even the poppies are green.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coopbastian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coopbastian/gifts).



> A donation commission for coopbastian, who requested some flufftastic misadventure for paladins!Flashvibe.

“I swear to God, Barry, if you do not slow this lion down _right now_ , I’ll—”

He was cut off by a barrel roll tight enough to make him tense every muscle in his body. Which was hard to do in space, where ‘up’ was nothing more than a meaningless construct.

Cisco groaned. “Oh man, that should not be possible.”

“This baby can do anything, can’t you, Red?” Barry grinned as he stroked the panels.

“Everything except get us where we’re going,” Cisco said, pointing out their location on the star map. “Or did you mean to take us two systems past the planet we’re headed for, _baby_?”

Barry grinned sheepishly and twitched the controls to turn them around, but more than anything he just looked pleased about the pet name.

 

 

Even when they landed, Cisco was unconvinced they’d found the right place. He glanced between the information Iris had written up and the landscape outside, frowning. ‘Extreme drought, resources dwindling, deep cracks in the mantle,’ the notes said. And outside the lion: green, as far as the eye could see.

“Huh.”

All the sensors were reading a liveable atmosphere, just a little thinner than Earth-average, so they’d have to watch out for any weakness but they were able to venture outside without sealed suits. As soon as the hatch opened, Cisco took a deep breath and nearly coughed at the overwhelming smell: like the planet had been soaked in floral perfume.

“What is that?” Cisco said, wrinkling his nose. “It’s kind of like tulips, but… not?”

“Space flowers,” Barry answered easily. “But where— Oh!” He nudged Cisco and pointed down at the ground below.

Cisco looked closer. It wasn’t, as he’d thought when he first saw it, a field of tall grass, but strange, thin flowers, all in the exact same shade of green. “Shit.” His eyebrows rose, following the flowers all the way out to the horizon. “It’s like the Emerald City. Even the poppies are green.”

“You don’t think they’ll put us to sleep, do you?”

“...No?” Cisco leaned into the flowers, holding up his wrist sensor. (God bless Altean technology; it had only taken a few tweaks to adjust the settings for what was safe for a human.) A few moments later, it dinged reassuringly. “No,” he repeated. “Definitely safe.”

He walked out a little further, running his fingers along the tips of the flowers and trying not to trample the stems. They were softer than they looked, parting easily as he slid through. They looked kind of like tiger lilies, but so tall and thin — almost half of their mid-thigh height was all petals — and the color patterns were all wrong.

“So this is the planet that’s supposed to be dying?” Barry asked, trailing slowly after Cisco and marveling at the flora. “‘Cause I gotta say, it looks pretty good right now.”

“Assuming we’re actually in the right spot,” Cisco said, shrugging when Barry shot him a look, “then maybe the information was outdated?”

Barry frowned. “Caitlin said the distress signal was recent.”

“Yeah, well.” Cisco looked around, scanning again for any sign of something wrong. The only thing he could find was a slight heaviness in his chest, a side-effect of the atmosphere, but nowhere near bad enough to worry about. “Their ecosystem could be on an entirely different time-scale than we’re used to.” It drove Caitlin crazy, how little their scientific background on Earth had prepared them for the variety of the universe. At least physics was mostly the same.

“Should we… go back to the lion, then?” Barry said uncertainly. “We could do a fly-over, in case it’s an isolated problem. Or call back to the Castle.”

Cisco considered it, but the logical solution fell away when he thought of how tense they’d been for weeks now, how many hours Barry had spent in the training room and how often his own fingers twitched toward his bayard. Also, the flowers were amazing.

“Or we could take a half-day?”

It took Barry less than a second to agree.

 

 

Fifteen minutes later, Cisco had a complicated ring of long petals woven through his hair. Honestly, he was surprised it had taken this long. Barry was kneeling down with his tongue between his teeth, working on another crown for himself. Flowers this thin seemed like they would fall apart at the first attempt to manipulate them, but these were stronger than they looked. It took some work to make them bend.

Still, lying in the field was like lounging on a bed of feathers.

“I can’t remember the last time I felt this relaxed,” Cisco sighed, eyes closed and hands folded beneath his head. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this _safe_ , really. But this was something like a scene from a movie, and with Red watching over them (arguably the most likely of the lions to respond if there were danger, even after all the time Cisco had spent knee-deep in Yellow’s hardware, but whatever, not like he was bitter), he could feel weeks of tension leaking out.

A heavy weight dropped down by his side, and he grinned when Barry’s lips met his forehead. “You’re blocking my sunlight,” Cisco complained.

“Can’t be,” Barry said. “There’s three suns here, coverage from every angle.”

“Thank fuck for these suits and their cooling systems,” Cisco agreed.

“Mm. And the way they hug your ass.”

Cisco’s eyes opened. “Okay, so it’s like _that_.” He flipped to the side, shoving Barry off him and into the bed of flowers. Barry hit the ground, laughing.

“Uncle! Uncle!”

“Absolutely _not_ , you started this, and you’ll—”

“No, wait, hold on a second.” His voice had smoothed out, an actual request, and practice had Cisco rolling off him in a second, hand reaching for his bayard, but— “No, no, not like that, just. I felt something?” Barry started rummaging around through the flower stems below him.

It took him a few moments. The flowers were so thick, it was hard to reach the ground beneath. Cisco hadn’t even seen dirt, yet. Finally, Barry peered down into the space between his hands, holding the stems apart.

“Whoa!”

“What?” Cisco asked nervously.

“Whoa!” Barry repeated, which was not at all helpful. “Come on!” He sprang to his feet, grabbing Cisco’s hand and yanking him along, and then they were running through the field, trampling flowers that sprang right back up as soon as they moved off.

Cisco didn’t pull back, but he still wanted to know why they were running. “Where are we going?”

“There’s gotta be another… There, there!”

Cisco didn’t see what he was pointing at until they skidded to a stop. He looked down, and saw a hole in the ground. A hole? “Um.”

“Look,” Barry said, pointing down.

So Cisco looked. At first, he thought it was just dirt, dug out in a circle about four feet across, tiny cracks running through like veins, but then he looked closer, engaged his depth perception. “Okay, yeah. Whoa.” Those were _canyons_ , hundreds of feet below.

“I think this is like cloud cover, or something.” Barry gazed down at the surface below in awe.

“They’d need it,” Cisco agreed, thinking again of the three suns. “Holy crap, this is a new one.”

“So I guess the distress beacon was legit, huh?”

It certainly seemed that way. The ground down there was cracked and dry, practically a wasteland from what Cisco could see, just as advertised. “We’re going down there?” Their jetpacks would smooth the descent, but they couldn’t bring Red, not through an entrance this size.

Barry shrugged. He hadn’t yet let go of Cisco’s hand, and he squeezed it now. “I’ll follow you.”

“All the way down,” Cisco agreed.

Together, they jumped.


End file.
